Friday, September 23, 2005

Just returned from a two-week business trip to Europe. We had a trade show in London and then a new product roll out to our distributors in Europe. Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam all in one week. OK. I have to be honest here. I really didn't need to go on any of the product roll outs but hey, I was in London and Paris is only a 35 minute flight and since my boss thought I could also use the time to visit a potential client...who am I to turn my nose up to a weekend in Paris?!

One day of work and two days of pure, unabashed gluttony. MBH thought I was joking when I told him my only plan for Paris was to see how many outdoor cafes I could visit in a 36-hour period and how many meals I could consume. It took me two weeks to plan my attack. Since I knew I only had a limited amount of time I decided to concentrate my efforts on a small area of the City of Light; the Latin Quarter and Montparnesse. By the end of Saturday I had sipped cafe au lait or wine at eight different cafes/brassieres, eaten breakfast (the' au lait and pain au chocolat) not once but twice at two little corner bakeries between the Jardin de Luxemburg and the Gastronome Livre (a bookstore of nothing but cook books), sampled the plat d' jour at a little bistro on a quite street near Norte Dame, met a friend of MBH's for a desert of crème brulee at Cafe Du Monde, and finished my whirlwind foodie tour with a glass of house red and a cafe' at the Brasserie de l’Ile St. Louis. This was the penultimate goal of my dining schedule. It was the movie Amelie and a picture by Peter Turnley taken in that little bar and which hangs over the chair I always sit in when at Dammits that started my obsession with Paris. It was only fitting that my last moments of cafe sitting in Paris should be spent there. But, by far the best meal I had while in Paris was also the most humble. The still warm baguette of bread, the hunk of semi soft cheese and the fabulous Bordeaux I picked up on my way back to my hotel to pack and leave for home the next day. I can still taste the wine...